Spring forward, Fall back. Most people use this simple phrase to remember the time changes that occur each year. I forgot one simple thing however, I’m south of the equator! This means that those months that I usually associate with winter are now summer and visa-versa. This really messed with my brain when we had our time change a few months ago. In my mind, it was spring which meant the clocks were going forward an hour. This was obviously not the case and the clocks went back an hour since of COURSE, March, April, May are fall months.
Samoa has a very interesting view on time changes. I happened to be in Manase during this last time change on a vacation. I was at my friend Kiri’s house on a Sunday and she woke up for church at her regular hour (with the time change taken into account), and woke up to find that her family had already left for church. Apparently the vast majority of activities in Samoa just shift their start and end times by an hour. So if something had started at 9am, it now started at 8am. Which made no sense at all to us confused foreigners. This continued at the resort the next day where we informed that dinner would no longer be served at 6:30 but would be at 5:30 instead. Why even have a time change if you’re just going to shift your start times???? When school started after break, sure enough, school was starting an hour early. However not everyone showed up that early so there wasn’t much structure for the first hour. It seemed a haphazard way to go about the time change. I wonder what it’ll be like in October?
Honestly though, I can understand why it’s done. The sun in Samoa is particularly brutal and the traditional Samoan day starts at sunrise. So no matter what the clocks say, people will get up with the sun and go about their schedule like normal. So maybe its us foreigners that are odd about enforcing a time change?
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